Theme A

How does interactive chemistry modify coupling between the stratospheric vortex and the rest of the climate system?

Few dynamic global atmosphere/ocean climate models include interactive stratospheric chemistry or realistic zonal descriptions of the severity of ozone loss, both of which are vital to understanding the coupled system.

Most climate models specify stratospheric ozone using monthly mean, zonal mean values and linearly interpolate to the time resolution of the model. We show that this method leads to significant biases in the simulated SH climate over the late twentieth century due to undersampling of the rapid temporal changes in ozone during the seasonal evolution of the Antarctic ozone hole. Our results suggest that the bias can be substantially reduced by specifying a daily ozone concentration.See Neely et al. 2014>